1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to identifying oral medications. Particularly, the present invention relates to a counterfeit detection and pill identification method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the pharmaceutical, law enforcement, and medical fields, it is necessary and desirable to identify and characterize oral and dermal medications (collectively referred to as “pills”). Among other things, being able to accurately identify and/or characterize one or more pills enables one to determine the nature of the substance and whether it poses a health risk to a person who ingested medication or pills from the same group. It also enables pharmaceutical companies and border enforcement officials to determine whether a medication is legitimate or counterfeit, and current or expired.
Current methods used to identify a medication rely heavily on visual inspection performed by humans. A person compares a pill or oral medication sample to a combination of a written description and accompanying photo. Most drug identification is performed this way and has been for a very long time. The quality of the identification often depends on the person correctly interpreting written definitions and pictures. In other methods of drug examination, a “computer vision” technique is used to identify drug shape, color, and size uniformity.
Error-free prescription fill is both an industry goal and a regulatory goal. Independent pharmacies are leaders in error-free prescription fill because they manually count pills or use manually-operated pill counting devices. Online prescription fill and chain drug store fill provide only a cursory examination of pills. Current products used for prescription fill collect only limited data for use in anti-counterfeit efforts. Although there are various pill counting and examination products available, no standardized method of displaying and sharing drug information is used.
Existing tools enable drug packagers to examine only portions of their product inventory. Pre-screening incoming inventory prior to packaging and distribution is performed manually or not at all. Drug manufacturers and pharmacies also do not have tools for examining the quality of pills and whether it has deteriorated due to shipping effects, temperature changes, aging, and manufacturing or packaging quality of medications.
In addition, no software-based tools for counterfeit detection are currently available to drug packagers, pharmacies, law enforcement, or the general public. Instead, the pharmaceutical industry and the Food and Drug Administration have requested a computer-based solution to these problems. The rapid increase in the number of generic drugs further emphasizes the need for anti-counterfeit tools.
In addition to the numerous issues above, current identification and counterfeit detection tools reject damaged or split pills. Current tools also ignore marking quality for anti-counterfeit applications. Further, no tool exists for addressing a pill's “drift” in appearance between the time of manufacture and the time of consumption. A pill's drift could indicate a counterfeit drug or a manufacturing quality issue.
Therefore, what is needed is an improved method and apparatus for identifying and characterizing pills, such as oral and dermal medications.